All Eyes on Her

Though All Eyes on Her would be categorized as being a mystery novel, it’s actually an absolutely engrossing character study centering around 17-year-old high schooler Tabitha “Tabby” Cousins who, on Friday, August 16, 2019, went on a picnic hike to the top of a lookout point near Coldcliff, Colorado, with Mark Forrester, her 20-year-old Princeton student boyfriend. The Monday, August 19, 2019 edition of The Coldcliff Tribune reported that Mark Forrester had “lost his footing and fell, plummeting almost 40 feet down” and that “[a] team of police divers found Forrester’s body” in the creek below. What Tabby calls an accident comes into question when an autopsy reveals that Mark, a champion swimmer, was not killed by the fall but, instead, drowned. For some, Tabby quickly goes from being seen as a “widow” of sorts to possibly being Mark’s killer.

Author Flynn divides the book’s contents into four parts, labeling each section with a portion of the traditional English nursery rhyme, “Jack and Jill”: Part I Jack and Jill went up the hill/To fetch a pail of water; Part II Jack fell down and broke his crown; Part III And Jill came tumbling; and the shortest section, Part IV After. Flynn also populates the novel with numerous characters who provide the book’s readers with their insights into Tabby, her character and her relationship with Mark. Among them are: Tabby’s 15-year-old sister, Bridget; best friend Eleanor “Elle” Ross who has a secret of her own; Beck Rutherford, Tabby’s “bad boy” ex who is largely seen through transcripts of police interviews; Louisa “Lou” Chamberlain, Beck’s former girlfriend; Keegan Leach, Mark’s best friend from high school who’s in a dead-end grocery store job; and Kyla Dove, Keegan’s girlfriend.

All Eyes on Her is very much a book for our contemporary “alternate facts” world in which individuals of all ages frequently rush to judgement and take often unbending positions while not questioning the sources of information they access. In addition to name-labelled chapters written in the first person by the book’s various characters, some breaking the fourth wall, readers will find “reproductions” of newspaper articles, web pages, tweets, texts, transcripts of police interviews and anonymous hotline tips, plus entries from Tabby’s hand-printed diary. After encountering all of the book’s “data”, readers must return to Tabby’s opening challenge: to not believe everything they have read or heard about her, but to make up their own minds about her as a person and her role in Mark’s death.

All Eyes on Her is an engaging read and could be used as corollary reading in a high school media studies unit.